Opinion | Cats Are Better Than Dogs (2024)

It’s not easy not being a dog person. Everyone loves a person who loves a dog. Dog people are fun loving and down to earth. Dog lovers are all-American and among animals living in people’s houses, dogs are decidedly the popular favorite; they like to chase things and play catch. A dog, in turn, is man’s best friend.

I once moderated a conversation for The Times between Susan Orlean and Julie Klam, both authors of books about dogs. They chortled over the incomprehensibility of people not liking dogs. “Everybody who reads my book is a dog person,” Klam, whom I also profiled for her memoir, “You Had Me at Woof,” said at one point. I kept my mouth shut.

Most cat people try not to make a show of it. It’s fine to like both animals, but there’s something distinctly suspect about people who outright prefer cats. Cats are considered finicky, standoffish, neurotic; their owners, too. To be catty is to be petty and spiteful. The black cat symbolizes misfortune and death. The very bad date in the story “Cat Person” has, of course, two cats.

There is something distinctly questionable, unmanly, weird about the male cat owner. As the essayist Tim Kreider writes in “A Man and His Cat”: “There is a certain stigma attached to Cat Bachelorhood,” vehement about “not going to turn into some Cat Guy.” (Despite this resistance, he later admits, “It is just about impossible, when I see her curled up asleep on the couch with her head upside down, not to bury my whole face directly in the center of the warm plush cat ball and say O mu mu mu mu mu.”)

The swinging dog owner is out and about at the dog run, but the single cat owner? Happy to stay at home. Give a guy a cat in the movies and that tells you he’s a real schlub. Take the film “Hit Man”: Glen Powell’s lonely and sad loser Gary has two cats. Sexy, married Gary? He’s got dogs.

For women, the downsides are worse. “Single woman with cat” is practically a Keep Out sign. A woman with more than one cat? Either sad and embarrassing or sad and “Fatal Attraction”-level unsettling. Someone who knits and will be found dead in her apartment surrounded by kitty litter. Remember: The ignoble phrase “childless cat lady” was how JD Vance chose to hit Kamala Harris hard.

I have three cats (I know), so permit me to be a little defensive.

But three cats, one cat – it’s pretty much the same because cats are independent. They come toilet trained. You can drop them and they land on their feet. You can keep them indoors – and you probably should; they’re satisfied yarping at passing birds through the window without killing them. By contrast, I could see the appeal of dogs if they didn’t need to be trained, didn’t bark, didn’t need to be walked, didn’t shed, didn’t smell, didn’t require washing or grooming.

Dogs need more, they take more, and I grant you, they give more in terms of slobber, tail wagging and unfettered loyalty. But forgive me if I find something unseemly in a dog’s slavish devotion to its master. “Dogs, especially, live to please us,” Tommy Tomlinson wrote recently in The Atlantic. “It is the way they have made themselves essential to our lives.” They love us like children because they cannot do otherwise.

“By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a ‘noble" animal?’” Mark Twain, cat loyalist, reportedly wrote when asked his opinion on dogs. “The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward — you can never get her full confidence again.” In other words, cats are for adults.

Cats are discriminating and rightfully so. They will enter a room without acknowledging those present. If you pet them too much or in the wrong fashion, they will let you know. Most cats do not want to be picked up nor care to be taken where you’d like them to go. Thou shalt not stuff an unwilling cat into a carrier.

This doesn’t mean cats aren’t affectionate, but you must win them over and on their terms. You must pay attention to their signals and learn to intuit their moods. But the rewards! When you find the precise spot to nuzzle on a kvetchy old tom’s scruff or when a cat bellies up on your lap knowing you’re safe, the bliss. When a cat seeks you out for a non-food purpose, you have earned it.

In one of the great children’s books of all time, “The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless Her Cat” by Lore Segal, a lonely woman adopts a stray intending him to warm her lap and purr on command. Purrly, as she dubs him, will do no such thing, instead hogging the bed, refusing to purr and, having been imposed upon, biting Mrs. Lovewright one day on the nose. Only in learning to accommodate him, as we must do with those we love, do the two grow on each other. Only in truly knowing and accepting one another, do we achieve deep love.

Yes, what I’m saying is that cats are more like people. As with humans, so with cats, who can be adored but not mastered; responsive, but never controlled; truly loved only with mutual acceptance and respect. And why expect more from our animals than we would wish for ourselves?